Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Wild and Crazy

I’m pretty beat today; most of my free time over the past two days has been spent gardening, and I hurt all over. I haven’t had the time to work on it seriously before, and it shows.

First, a brief recap of the goodies from Sunday:


A Breyer Embajador XI, an adorable Napco Bulldog, and a Beswick Foal!

I already have the Foal, and this one has a slight glaze flake on his ear anyway. The Bulldog is stinking cute - that wrinkly face! - but I’m trying to cut back on my non H-R Chinas due to space reasons. So neither one gets to stay.

The Pluto is a keeper; I’ve been eyeballing them on eBay, but I wasn’t quite willing to pay retail plus postage for one. The paint job is wildly unrealistic, but it just works on him, you know? Most of the other Pluto releases have a certain sameness to them. They’re not unattractive, but their similarity to each other doesn't exactly inspire any passion in my heart.

Some of it is a function of the breed the mold is supposed to represent - most Lipizzaners are some shade of Gray, it’s true - but with a color as variable as Gray can be, you’d think they would at least try to be a bit more daring with it, no? Or even mix it up with an historical color or two, maybe?

It's not like he's the most realistic mold in the line, anyway. He's a portrait of a Foundation stallion, and he doesn't even have boy parts! Why not put a wildly improbable Baroque-styled Black Pinto on him, just for kicks? The polka-dot leopard in this year’s "Let’s Go Riding - English" set is a good start; I would be such a happy camper if I could find one in the Sample boxes this July. (With even more spots, I hope!)

Some Embajadors do have that over-the-top quality; more conservative ones have fewer, more polka-dotty dapples. Lucky for me, I did get one of the wild-and-crazy guys. (Dapples in the tail for the win, yo.) I don't know which one is the scarcer variation; he's not a heavily collected mold in the first place, so I doubt it matters much, price wise.

The China miniatures that I left behind last week also reappeared. Unfortunately my "poker face" slipped, so I had to pay full price for them - no group discount this time! Ah well, the combined price for all 30 some pieces still works in my favor. Except for the keeping-most-of-them-for-myself part.

Many other oddments were purchased, including a sheepskin (for the car), some vintage quilt scraps, a stack of late Victorian magazines with amazing engravings, and a bag of silk ties for a future quilt project.

(BTW, for those of you who may be interested, I may be turning "pro" with the quilting thing in the near future - blogging and pattern making, at the very least. When time allows, of course.)

Next up, what everyone else is talking about: the Giant-Sized Foal-Thing!

2 comments:

Carrie said...

I, for one, have never seen an Embajador that wasn't polka-dappled & did not know he came in this much handsomer version! Lipizzaners have been bred for fast, complete greying but yes, seeing something like Baroque colors on Pluto would be great. Congrats on more nifty flea-finds!

Julie said...

Kudos on your marvelous find!

Please correct me if I'm wrong, I recall seeing a huge model that breyer made. So large that it made strapless look like a little bit.